Recent Posts

Beware: Phishing and Spam in Social Networks

Trend Micro warns us today about how spam and phishing can hit you even in the closed ecosystem of a social networking system such as Facebook. Malware abounds. And in the social network arena, just like anywhere else, “using your account to send spam” is a common thing for the bad guys to want to do.
In Rik Ferguson’s investigation (which I read about on CNet News), he came across a link to a URL that asked for his Facebook credentials, supposedly necessary to allow installation of a specific Facebook application. Once the credentials were handed over, the app immediately spammed all of his Facebook friends, sending them a bogus notification, attempting to draw them into visiting the phishing/malware URL, with (one assumes) the hope of spreading the infection even wider.
He’s a researcher for Trend Micro, so he knows what he’s doing. But for the rest of us, this highlights how necessary it is to be careful with who you give your usernames and passwords to. In my opinion, it’s never safe to take your username and password from one site and hand it over to another site. Some social networking make the problem even worse by blurring the lines between safe and unsafe by asking for usernames and passwords to third party accounts, but you just can never know with 100% certainty which sites are legitimate and which ones aren’t.
— Al Iverson

White House spamming: update

There’s quite a discussion about the White House spam going on over at Bronto Blog.
Ken Magill wrote about the controversy today in Magilla Marketing. Anyone who’s followed his newsletter for a while knows he’s been reporting on politicians buying and sharing lists for the last few months. He has some data that may help clarify where the addresses aren’t coming from.

Yahoo and Verizon

Mickey at Spamtacular has information about Verizon’s email system that will have relevance for anyone working in delivery.

White House sending spam?

There has been some press about political spam recently. People are receiving email from the White House that they have not opted into. At a recent press conference a reporter challenged the press secretary to defend the practice.
Chris Wheeler over at Bronto blog points out that CAN SPAM doesn’t apply as this is political mail, and CAN SPAM only covers commercial email. He also notes that most of the mail came from “forward to a friend” links which the sender has little to no control over.
Gawker has a post up “Everything you need to know about Obama’s Spam-Gate.”
There are a lot of issues here. Chris asks a number of questions on his blog, that I encourage people to think about.

Failed delivery of permission based email

A few weeks ago, ReturnPath published a study showing that 20% of permission based email was blocked. I previously discussed the definition of permission based email and that not all the mail described as permission based is actually sent with the permission of the recipient. However, I only consider this a small fraction of the mail RP is measuring, somewhere in the 3 – 5% range. What happens with the other 17 – 15% of that mail? Why is it being blocked?
There are 3 primary things I see that cause asked for and wanted email to be blocked.

Maine prohibits marketing to minors

Last week, the state of Maine passed a law prohibiting marketing using personal information to minors without verifiable consent from a parent or guardian. From what I understand, this law started out as a prohibition on using health information for marketing and expanded to any personal information.
The law defines personal information as:

More Gordon v. Virtumundo news

Eric Goldman reviews the appeals court decision in Gordon vs. Virtumundo.

Delivery Blog Carnival – Selling, trading and renting email addresses

A couple weeks ago, I linked to a comment from a marketer mentioning that email addresses should be able to be traded around like snail mail addresses. I suggested this might be a good topic to hear from a lot of different people on.
Mickey posted List Rental is…. In that post he looked at how email is different from direct mail and how the attitudes are different as well.
The folks at Bronto got into the spirit of the blog carnival and Kristin, Kelly and Chris all contributed to a single post offering their perspectives on trading lists, intrusive marketing and delivery.
Al Iverson has two posts on buying lists. One is an older post talking about the delivery hassles and problems related to purchased lists from the perspective of a ESP delivery expert. Over on his SpamResource blog, he posts about the same issue from the perspective of a recipient who is tired of receiving spam.
I also posted on the issue, looking at how email is not snail mail and senders cannot be successful in email by applying the direct mail rules.
Thanks to everyone who submitted posts.

9th circuit ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo

The 9th circuit court of appeals issued their ruling in Gordon v. Virtumundo today. The ruling was heavily in favor of Virtumundo. I have not had time to read the ruling, but both Venkat and Mickey have posts on the case and the ruling.
This is another solid blow against anti-spammers suing spammers under state laws and CAN SPAM. The problem is that many of the cases are brought by people, and lawyers, who fail to understand that just because they don’t like something doesn’t make it illegal. Spammers do a lot of bad things, but the ones you can track enough to sue are generally not breaking the law. Sadly, cases like Gordon and Mummagraphics makes it harder for ISPs to sue spammers that are actively harming the ISP and the customers.

Email is not direct mail

A few weeks ago someone commented on a previous post of mine about list purchasing saying that at some point senders should be able to trade and sell email lists like they trade and sell direct mail lists. As much as marketers may not like this, email is never going to be the free for all that direct mail is and they’re never going to have the ability to trade email addresses the way they do physical addresses.
I don’t think this “marketing opportunity” is going to be realized for two major reasons. One, marketing is intrusive and people are more resistant to intrusions in their email boxes than intrusions in other places. Two, marketers own many of the channels used for marketing, but they don’t own email.
Billboards, commercials, flyers dropped in the driveway, garbage in the mailbox, door-to-door salespeople, telemarketers interrupting dinner, pop-up ads that cover up the content on the website. All of these push marketing into the daily lives of people. Marketers set out to intrude and interrupt their targets. The interruptions often generate frustration and anger. Marketers also make it difficult, if not impossible, to opt-out of the marketing. “Put me on your do not call list” doesn’t always work. Requesting to be removed from a catalog list rarely works. The only way to avoid pop-ups is to avoid those websites that serve them. Door to door sales people just keep coming and each one is sure the “no soliciting” sign is not directed at them.
Marketers have created an over-saturation of marketing. People are frustrated and exasperated by the interruptions. Many feel powerless in the face of so many intrusions.
Email marketing is, in many ways, the ultimate in intrusive and interruptive marketing. The marketer can send email whenever they want and it waits to interrupt the recipient. Combine this with how people use email and it is a recipe for recipients being intolerant of unasked for email marketing.
Email is, at its heart, a way for people to communicate with one another. It is a more immediate and personal way of communicating than writing letters to each other. Email is closer to a replacement for phones than it is for a replacement of snail mail. People started seeing their inbox as a way to have close to real-time conversations. Marketing email, particularly unasked for marketing email, is often seen as an interruption of the conversation. Unasked for marketing email is much closer to a telemarketers calling during dinner than it is to receiving an unsolicited credit card offer in a mailbox.
People don’t really like unasked for marketing emails, many of them refer to such emails as spam.
People feel a lot of ownership over their inbox. This ownership results in loud calls to their ISPs to stop the spam. The ISPs have responded by providing more and more controls over who can intrude in any one users inbox. The end result is that end users have more control in this medium than they have in other types of intrusive and interruptive marketing. As long as the power is in the recipients hands, marketers will find it difficult to trade addresses around like they do for snail mail.
This individual control directs the actions of the ISPs. If enough customers tell an ISP that a particular sender is sending spam, then the ISP will block that mail. The ISPs are gatekeepers protecting their customers from spam. The power of one person blocking a single mail is multiplied when thousands of people block the same mail. Eventually, the ISP will stop the mail from getting to the users.
ISP customers have said, loud and clear, we do not like spam. ISPs responded by blocking spam, instituting lawsuits against spammers and promoting laws that make some types of spam illegal. Until the business model of ISPs change, that is they’re not making money from their customers and are instead making money from email marketers, the ISPs will continue to listen and set standards that make recipients happy.
In this one area marketing targets have more influence and power than marketers. Marketers can’t treat email like another direct channel because marketers don’t own the channel and don’t make the rules there. This is why trading address lists around is not going to become an acceptable or accepted practice.